Posts Tagged ‘Journalism’

A profession of the passionate

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

My childhood started with a doctor’s appointment. I had high fever that started to worry my parents. They brought me to Park Nicollet hospital for a routine checkup. Several days later, my trip to the hospital turned into stage IV neuroblastoma cancer. As an 18-month-old child, I was fighting a tumor the size of a pop can. My doctors gave me a 20-percent chance to live.

The next few years included a lot of needle pricks and chemotherapy, but I can only remember a few vague details. I would often race down the hospital hallways with an IV in my arm, occasionally running too fast and needing a second poke. I always chose the Sesame Street band-aids and enjoyed the quick rides into the CAT scan. The Pac Man arcade game was always a nice bonus, too.

It is amazing how one event, which I hardly remember, has changed my entire perception on life. Since then, several of my friends and family members have lost their own battles to cancer, and I struggle to understand why my battle was any different.

My life as a cancer survivor has been a constant search for purpose, and I’ve found that purpose through journalism. By using my skills as a journalist, I can help cover important issues and give back to the world that gave me life. It’s a profession where I can use my storytelling abilities to change the way people understand and interact with the world around them.

The journalism profession is facing its own struggle for survival. Many mainstream news organizations are now counting page views in place of meaningful impressions. In better times, I would have graduated and applied for an entry-level reporting position. I could have started in a small market and worked my way through the system, but many of those opportunities are no longer available.

In August, 2009, I founded Ewen Media, a multimedia production company that uses interactive multimedia to share meaningful stories. Its mission is to use purpose-driven journalism to explore the world in its current state and the world that it could become.

I am definitely taking a risk. In three months, my student loans will arrive in the mail and I will likely be crushed by financial burden. However, I am prepared to move forward knowing that I am a fighter, willing to take big risks and make bold decisions, in a desperate attempt to protect the profession that I love.

The future of journalism will be strong because thousands of young journalists are willing to follow their hearts and pursue a profession much greater than themselves. 20 years from now, I am proud to know that my colleagues and I will be the ones who ran toward the industry while all others were running out. Together, we will form a “profession of the passionate” and forever change the world.

To learn me about McKenna Ewen, please visit his Web site at http://ewenmedia.com or follow @McKennaEwen on Twitter.

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Transitioning from print journalism

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Every morning I followed the same routine. I walked the four blocks from my apartment to Howard University’s campus, eyes glancing back-and-forth between my BlackBerry and the pavement below my feet. On the small screen of my phone, I read news alerts from the Associated Press, Washington Post, Detroit Free Press and ESPN. About halfway into my trek I would stop and pick up a copy of The Express, a free commuter paper from the Washington Post. I would slide my phone into my pocket and begin flipping through the tabloid-format newspaper. Occasionally, I would stop and consider the fact that my lifestyle contributed to the struggles of an industry that I have been working toward becoming a part of since high school.

I initially decided to pursue a career in journalism because I wanted to tell people’s stories. I chose newspapers as my medium because I felt the stories were more in-depth and informational. Having spent nearly my entire collegiate career working toward a career in print journalism, it took me some time to accept the fact that things were changing and that my carefully-planned career map may need some slight tinkering. But I eventually came to the realization that an industry shift toward multimedia journalism had its perks. Disseminating news on multiple platforms is not only convenient for audiences in today’s fast-paced culture, but simply put, some stories are more effectively told through pictures and sound, while others through graphics and viewer interaction.

I concluded that at the end of the day, no matter the medium, the news must be delivered in a way that people can understand. I learned how to take basic journalistic skills from my print experience and use it in different mediums, and I am excited to continue working toward becoming a versatile multimedia journalist. The more ways a story can be told, the greater the number of people that can be reached, and thus, the greater the impact.

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Location, Location, Location

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

It has become painstakingly obvious anymore that the old model of journalism was flawed early on. It was successful, no doubt, thanks in large part to any lack of true competition. The Chicago Tribune dominated the Midwest, the NY Times the Northeast and so on. In some places that is still true today: You can see The Oregonian’s colossal presence statewide, albeit smaller paper’s struggle to contend.

But these time-tested pillars of success are beginning to topple.

Where The Oregonian once dominated the state, smaller organizations are now thriving. True, those same outlets haven’t skated free and clear, either, but they’ve evolved faster than the dinosaurs with which they previously competed: In place of gargantuan-sized staffs filling the pages of color dailies, consumers are enjoying free, online content specific to their exact county, their city and even their neighborhood.

Indeed, the key factor to this whole evolution (rather, devolution, in some cases) has been just one word: local.

Long gone are the (successful) days of state-wide journalism. Oh, sure, there will always be a story affecting mass amounts of people, and the larger organizations will continue to bank on those big breaks. But by keeping things at the micro-level, the future of journalism will surely thrive. How? Nobody knows exactly. When? Good question.

Some areas may succeed with simply well-timed blog posts; others, video presentations. Multimedia will flourish while paper products vanish. One thing will be certain, though: As long as it’s local, it will surely succeed.

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Smaller is better.

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

Everyone has a story. And told the right way, to the right audience, that story is going to be interesting to someone.

The problem is that the market continues to get too big and those little stories that people want to hear have no place in the papers the way they used to.

I remember being scared  a few years back about what I was going to do after school since it looked like newspapers were failing left and right, and the first jobs to go were designers and copy editors. I  love print design and decided early on to make that my concentration in the journalism field. The more I learned, the more I realized that I needed to have multiple skills sets to survive in this new dawn of journalism. This was an exciting discovery. Or so I thought.

What made it not so exciting was the realization that if I, as a multimedia journalist, am doing four different jobs that make up my current job, how was I gong to find the time to seek out those smaller stories that drive my passion for journalism?

The more people that leave = the more general work there is to do= more local stories that remain hidden.

For example:

Our local afternoon paper, The Albuquerque Tribune, closed its doors a few years back and the amazing hyper-localized journalism they delivered left with it.

“Things will be OK,” I told myself. The other paper will pick up the local angles that the Tribune left behind and we would all be happy again. That never happened though. In fact, not to my surprise now that I look back at it, the journalism got worse in our town. Now that there was only the giant and no David left to keep it honest, journalism quality plummeted on the local level. It seemed that the small attitude of the town disappeared with the small newspaper.

I soon stopped dreaming abut working at those big metro dailies and instead started looking for high quality medium to small sized papers. And I was so pleased in what I found. The small papers, in my opinion, are the unsung heroes and future of the journalism world. They look in all of the nooks and crannies and find hidden gems.

More and more too many papers are pushing national news that is way too old by the time it hits the racks the following morning. Old news before its out. Simple as that.

I personally would like to see the conglomerates that own the majority of the countries daily newspapers fail. I say this because once they fail to the point they don’t want to own them, newspapers will hopefully be bought by local companies and the newspaper in your town will reflect life in your town.

Of course the problem is how do we get back to true local journalism? Well if I knew that I would hope that someone would buy said idea from me, but until that happens… I’ll have to pretend to know how. The future lies in the youth. Like you haven;t heard that before right? Well its the truth. Younger people today have much more information readily available to them. This allows the creativity and ideas to be that more innovative when they surface. Now that there is no standard model left in the industry, the rules can be broken and reinvented.

I truly believe that if editors would embrace the new ideas our generation is coming up with, we will find that balance of innovation and tradition. And hopefully a little profit on the side.

Just remember big things can come from small packages, as well as newspapers.

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